Reutershas an interesting look at how we’re (not) responding. The economy is “grinding through a prolonged stretch of rising poverty andincome inequality“, but America has decided that “the able-bodied poor don’t deserve much help”:

[There are] 12.2 million adults of working age, with no children at home, who were living below the poverty level in 2011. That’s up nearly double from two decades ago. And of those, 5.6 million received no assistance from any of the major five federal programs, a Reuters analysis of Current Population Survey data found. That’s the highest number since 1992, the first year for which comparable records are available.

There were 46 million Americans living below theofficial povertyline in 2011, up from31 millionin 2000; the number remains scary no matter whichmeasureof poverty you use. And even as the rural population falls, therural poverty ratehas continued growing, as it has since the 1960s.